Daily Archives: July 13, 2010

Last night, I was cleaning up in the kitchen and Shiloh was lying in his bed in the adjacent dining room. The room was deserted and the light was off and as I was banging around he started growling intensely. I hadn’t heard him growl like that for awhile and so went into the room and he began growling more and barking…at me. Very strange behavior, even for him. I considered and discarded a number of theories (injured? startled from a deep sleep and disoriented? scared?) and couldn’t figure it out. I sat beside him for a while (not wanting to reinforce the behavior that if he growled I’d abandon the bottom floor of the house) and he eventually calmed down but was clearly agitated.

When I woke up this morning and went into the dining room to give him his customary morning scratch and pet session he was as if nothing had happened. Affectionate, tail wagging and ready to start the day.

I, unfortunately, had woken up with a feeling of pressure behind my left eye which steadily grew into a painful migraine.

Shortly after getting to work, we had some fairly serious thunderstorms and I was reminded that occasionally my migraines are triggered by thunderstorms, I suspect linked in some way to changes in barometric pressure (It must be a fairly specific set of circumstance since most thunderstorms produce no headache. Under some circumstances, in fact, upcoming thunderstorms can produce something similar to a sense of euphoria but I always assumed that was more psychological than physiological. As I think about it now, it’s a feeling very similar to how I feel after a migraine passes…hmmm…interesting).

Anyway, it occurred to me that perhaps Shiloh’s reaction last night was one similar to what I experienced just a few hours later. I did a google search for dog migraines and the results are paltry to say the least. I suppose there’s no reason to believe that animals would be immune to migraines and certainly some believe that animals are sensitive enough to atmospheric and geological changes to anticipate earthquakes, weather,etc.

I know people are eventually supposed to resemble their pets but sharing medical conditions is going a bit far…

Since I’ve finally finished my counter terrorism class I can now put up my paper on the above subject. Given the complete lack of open source data I don’t think it does more than raise some (I hope, interesting) questions. I can’t help but think that ‘get tough’ policies and hysterical rhetoric about animal rights/environmental groups is ultimately going to have two negative consequences. It’s going to scare legitimate activists into silence (which might be seen as an ultimate positive by elements who like to whittle democracy down to a once every four year event – every two years if your a senior citizen) and it’s going to attract and further radicalize a smaller subset of people that 1) are already convinced the government is an evil Leviathan swallowing up individual freedoms and 2) thrive on playing the martyr.